Human sensory perception is limited by the nature of human senses. For example, humans are not able to see in the dark or at least not able to see sufficiently well under low-visibility conditions, such as night, fog, rain, and so on.
As an example, in the automotive industry, there exist various types of driver assistance systems for alerting or warning a driver of potential dangers through vision, sound and/or touch based on the detection of certain events, such as out of lane, speeding, drowsiness, close proximity to an object, and so on. However, such conventional warning systems typically only alert the driver of the existence of certain events, such as a voice alert to the driver when the speed of the vehicle exceeds a speed limit, a touch alert through the vibration of the steering wheel when the vehicle departs a lane, a touch alert through the vibration of the driver's seat when a nearby object is detected, and so on. That is, in such conventional warning systems, the warning or alert is based on a binary condition (i.e., on or off). For example, under normal circumstances (e.g., when no danger is detected), the warning system is inactive or does not provide any alert, and only under abnormal circumstances (e.g., when danger is detected), the warning system is activated to alert the driver. Thus, such conventional warning systems only provide a type of notification, which activate (or be in an “ON” state) to notify the driver when certain event(s) is detected and otherwise remain inactive (or be in an “OFF” state).
However, such conventional warning systems suffer from various problems or issues. For example, although the driver is notified of the existence of certain event(s), there is a lack of additional information or details associated with such event(s) being provided or conveyed to the driver. For example, although conventional warning systems may notify the driver of a nearby object, the driver may only be aware that there is a nearby object, but may not be aware of various additional information about such an event that may be helpful to the driver, such as the location/direction of the nearby object and the degree of proximity to the nearby object. In such a case, for example, the driver may have to resort to turning his/her head around to look behind the vehicle in an attempt to locate the object, which may undesirably distract the driver's concentration on driving and increase the chance of a traffic accident. Furthermore, as mentioned above, since the warning or alert is based on a binary condition, the driver does not receive continuous feedback on the surrounding environment and is only alerted when immediate or urgent action is necessary. The driver may thus not be able to anticipate such an alert, and thus may be surprised when alerted.
A need therefore exists to provide a haptic system for providing sensory augmentation to a subject that seeks to overcome, or at least ameliorate, one or more of the deficiencies of conventional haptic systems, such as to convey more information about certain event(s) to the subject and/or to enable the subject to be more aware of the surrounding environment. It is against this background that the present invention has been developed.